Update on the roommates heard having sex situation, because I wanted to defuse this as fast as possible–thanks everyone for the advice! And yes, this situation was, unfortunately, 100% true, no matter how farfetched it may have seemed:

So I came in Tuesday morning and ran into said coworkers in the break room. They seemed a little less jittery, so maybe their “overreaction” was just my reading too much into things from my own mortification. However, I casually asked them why I hadn’t seen them around lately, and that if it had anything to do with our recent conference call and that I want to apologize again that my roommates were unaware I was on a call and were upstairs having fun.

As it turns out…the majority of the commenters were right! They did, indeed, think I had been watching porn (and let’s face it, who wants to imagine their coworkers watching porn? It’s enough to make anyone uncomfortable)! Apparently they had completely missed my hasty mention of my roommates on the call! The joke of the day has been, “Soo…you sure you’re really watching media clips over there?” between the three of us.

P.S. Landlady believes my protein supplements, fish oil, etc. cause deathly illnesses, and that “ladies shouldn’t take them,” which is why she won’t let me use them with her knowledge. I can happily say I’m looking at other housing options (and making sure my mute button stays on unless I’m talking!).

I’m glad that you’ve managed to turn it into a fun joke that everyone can enjoy. Its definitely been a great source of fun for my team (all telecommuters) who have heard everything but background sex on conference calls!

+1. I second this. So many problems can be resolved with clear, open communication. A bit of levity also comes in handy from time to time. People will be talking about this story for years to come now instead of it being the “creepy” incident they all thought it was.

I am absolutely cracking up over the land lady. I sometimes think it takes a special kind of crazy to be a landlord. I had one that wouldn’t allow fans in the bedroom because apparently sleeping with a fan on your face will kill you.

Based on this discussion, is there any single “old country” where people don’t believe that a draft is dangerous? It seems not.

Here in Mexico, moving air is cold *by definition*. So, for example, on a hot afternoon, when a hot wind starts up, all my in-laws (of every age) will come inside (where it’s 15 degrees cooler) and shiver under blankets but happy because they are protecting themselves from the dangerous wind which might make them cold.

Ha, I get goosebumps whenever there’s a breeze, even when it’s 38C. For some reason my brain says “Goosebumps! Woe! You must be very cold, find a jacket or snuggly person. STAT!”
Then again, I pretty much always want to find a snuggly person. My friends don’t call me ‘cuddle-slut’ for nothing.

I grew up in the rural midwest in the US and many members of my family believe this. It’s kind of a folk medicine belief in some parts of the rural US too (though I have heard that it’s very common in Korea as well.)

I’m inclined to think that the “drafts kill” thing stems from the days and places where cleanliness and animal husbandry were not the best. If, as in England of yore, a summertime breeze was likely to bring you a mix of dust and various manures that had been powdered by traffic, you might well decide that moving air was not just unpleasant but hazardous — and you’d probably have been right.

My son spent time in Ukraine and it was also a popular belief there. People wouldn’t even open a window on a sweltering bus that was standing-room only because someone might get sick with all the “cold air” blowing in.

Yes, I think so. But it was still really funny. Whenever the landlord needed to come into our apartment for repairs or what have you, we had to take the table top fans off our nightstands. I’m pretty sure the no bedroom fan rule was in our lease.

The draft! I think the entire Eastern Europe is afraid of the draft. Never, ever open the windows on a bus or on a train, even when it’s sweltering inside; the draft is worse than any heat. It will give you an instant cold and might kill you.

Yes! My mother in law is from ex Yugoslavia and is terrified of drafts! Also anyone not wearing socks is going to get sick. Also all grandchildren must be wearing undershirts that must be tucked into their underwear. Also ice cream will give you a sore throat. :)

If you don’t have shoes on you can step on a needle and it can go through your foot and travel through your circulatory system to your heart and kill you.

And if you go on an escalator with untied shoes it will cause a fall which will result in having your leg amputated.

To this day I don’t know how a needle can go through my foot without my noticing and so accurately thread itself through my veins …or why if my show got stuck I wouldn’t just slide out of it rather than lose a leg.

I mean, if they weren’t tied how hard would it be?

And never fall asleep on a plane – God knows what strangers would do to you. Stay alert!

My now late greataunt was apparently convinced that random kidnappers were drugging and selling young English women into prostitution in South America.
Apparently, if you felt yourself about to faint, before you passed out you should shout ‘I do not know anyone in this lift/carriage/bus’ (as the case might be). Otherwise, next thing you knew, you’d be on the docks at Buenos Aires…

What can actually happen with untied shoes on an escalator is that the loose laces can get dragged into the top/bottom of the escalator, where the steps go into the floor. The shoe will pretty much tighten to the point where you can’t get it off instantly.

When I was a little kid, my dragging shoelace got caught at the top of an escalator and my shoe wouldn’t come off (I assume the lace was knotted and dragging but can’t remember ) The thing kept pulling on my foot and people were tumbling over me and my mother was screaming. Still remember this after 65 years. Still have my leg though.

I’m another one who’s gotten a shoelace caught in the escalator. It didn’t help *my* fear of them either. I still use the escalators when I have to, but I haven’t bought a single pair of lace-up shoes since.

It’s true. I’ve spent many hours in the back seat of a car (on various trips) with my Oma and Opa begging them to roll down a window. On a good day it could be cracked but then with strict instructions to inform them if there’s a draft.

Never seemed to get that a draft would’ve really been ideal in the sweltering back seat of that car.

Ha! My German & Romanian family is practically fresh-air phobic due to the association of drafts and illness. It makes driving in the car in any sort of warm weather totally unpleasant. Even air conditioning that is blowing too directly gets the same treatment!

Haha. InTthe Netherlands, there’s a fear of drafts because you might have to turn on your heating and spend money. They still won’t turn on the heat anyway but at least with the draft you’re more comfortable.

And if you’re a woman, never sit on the ground because your ovaries could freeze, rendering you infertile!

When I lived in France, they seemed to have a deathly fear of “courants d’air” (air currents) in the house when you open windows. My Brazilian roommate and I were in a constant passive fight with our French roommates over opening the windows.

Speaking of ovaries…my mom wouldn’t let us girls help our dad with any heaving lifting “because we had ovaries.” My husband isn’t buyin’ it. To this day if I have to lift something heavy, I think in my most dramatic “poor me” voice, “OY! MY OVARIES!!”

It reminds me of when I was apartment hunting in DC. I kept having to adjust my wish list because I would see things like “only a hot plate” and “not recommended for people of 6 feet tall.” So to me, no fish oil isn’t that bad.

I’m curious – commenters, would you have assumed your coworker was watching porn? I can’t imagine I would but maybe that’s because I’ve lived in so many apartments with thin walls that I’m primed for that explanation.

It never occurred to me either. I still don’t know how it wasn’t muffled enough to clearly indicate it wasn’t electronically sourced…but it’s been established that I am neither an expert in acoustics of buildings nor a sound engineer for the porn industry.

No, but especially since it was a female. The worst assumption I would make if I heard the sounds is that the person was watching an R-rated movie during the meeting out of boredom, etc. That there might be People Upstairs would not be on my radar.

While I think the OP indicated that it was a thin wall issue, there are also sometimes super weird accoustics that make sounds penetrate more normally insulated walls. Friends of ours live in a condo with a corner where, for whatever reason, if you stand there and their neighbors are in their kitchen, you can hear what they’re saying just like they were standing next to you.

Yep. I dated a guy in a house once who had roommates living on the other side of a wall, across a hall, and in a basement directly below him. We never heard the roommate through the wall or the roommate across the hall, but there was a vent that meant he and I heard everything the downstairs couple was up to, and we knew they heard everything we were up to. Even watching TV in bed at night we’d keep the volume super low.

In college, a person from an apartment upstairs from us asked me who was watching all the raunchy porn in our apartment during lunch. It had been really nice weather and my roommate, who had been having lunchtime rendezvous with her BF, had left her bedroom window open.

Oh man, I used to overhear my roommate listening to what I thought was some kind of very dark, violent porn that involved both loud sex and loud screaming of pain. It was only after I started watching Game of Thrones that I realized what it was.

Hahaha! That’s the main reason I always watch Game of Thrones with headphones on. (The other is that wearing headphones allows me to yank them out and close my eyes at the same time when I anticipate a beheading.)

based on what i know about my co-workers’ personalities/professionalism and also since i’m used to most people i know living an an apartment/condo situation and not free standing houses, i would not have assumed porn.

but if it’s a community where most people don’t rent, maybe people don’t automatically think of upstairs neighbors or roommates.

i would be massively surprised at a coworker watching porn while on a call, but not surprised at a coworker playing candy crush.

I would’ve guessed a rogue pop-up or raunchy auto-playing ad on an ordinary site. I like to think my coworkers know not to watch things like that on conference calls, but an ad or spyware can sneak up on you unawares!

IOW, if you have sufficient experience watching porn on your computer, maybe you think of porn first, and if you’ve sufficient experience sharing an apartment wall with an enthusiastically noisy couple, you think of noisy neighbors first.

I don’t watch porn and I’ve certainly overhead sexytimes before, but I assumed it was porn based on the coworkers reaction — they were clearly weirded out. If they thought it was people doing it another room, why be weirded out at the LW?

No, but I get why people did. A lot of people– and I mean a lot, a very large part of the population, most of which are otherwise pretty normal –will have porn on whenever they’re on the computer. Just… Always.

For whatever reason, this comment made me think of the scene in fight club where jack goes home early to Marla and Tyler having very noisy sex, and the chandelier swinging while he’s doing sit ups. I always feel like I need to turn the tv down when that scene comes on …

hasn’t everyone had the experience of keeping their computer on mute and then unmuting for something and finding that a previous window is also playing and will interfere with whatever you want to hear until you close (not minimize that window). The first thing I thought of when I heard the story was that they assumed she had minimized her porn window and when she took the computer off mute for the conference call, the porn window played and then all heard it.

My Ukrainian mother-in-law used to get hysterical about me painting. Apparently raising your arms over your head, as in painting the top of the wall and ceiling, can cause infertility, miscarriage and extreme annoyance. No, wait a minute, that last was me.

A friend’s Russian host mother used to yell at her for sitting on the ground, and for wearing pants. And sometimes doing those things simultaneously! Apparently it was both unladylike and going to lead to infertility.

I’m sure it was unintentional, but using “hysterical” here is funny because the root word means “uterus” and ancient people actually thought wandering uteruses were a medical issue that caused hysteria

Major props to you! When I was in high school (and significantly chubbier) I was on the swim team – now that I’ve replaced most of my fat with muscle I can barely stay afloat. Super impressed by people who manage to combine those sports. :D

Ha! Yes! Open water in particular you NEED the extra insulation. My former coach would regularly have me gain ten pounds on the on-season in order to keep me “warm” and give me extra buoyancy. I’d go from 20% bf to 25% and then cut back down on the off season!

I think this is a good time to share a story a male friend once told me. He lived in a house with two other guys, and he came home one night after a night out drinking. He went to his room, closed his door, plugged his headphones into his computer, and turned on porn REALLY LOUDLY, apparently. He figured it was fine since he was using headphones.

The next day, it turned out that he had drunkenly plugged his computer into his speakers, not his headphones. He had blasted the whole house with extremely loud porn for about an hour in the middle of the night.

That sucks. Did roommate find him the next morning passed out on top of the bed with headphones on, tv on, and the speakers humming? That would have been hilarious. Those are the stories you tell forever.

I’m still curious about her not “letting” you use supplements. What will happen if you disobey her? I guess whatever it is, it’s not worth it, not the hill to die on, etc etc, but . . . I just hate to hear grown adults talk about someone not “letting” them do something.

Well, I suppose I COULD take them if I really wanted to (and do anyways, since I wake up at four in the morning most days and plop them in a shaker bottle), but she went into absolute HYSTERICS last time and e-mailed me a ton of extraneous articles on the “subject.”

OP, I truly don’t mean to quibble and please read my tone as sincere and not snarky at all. But my next question is….who cares about her hysterics? On the one hand, it’s a flip thing for me to say since I am not the recipient of it, but I wonder if its’ something like where she follow you around haranguing you for it all day and it’s truly oppressive. Or do you just have to listen to the Charlie Brown “wa wa wa wa” in the background and you can just nod politely and do what you want anyway. And I’d think the emails would be a simple matter of “delete!” But then again, I have an extraordinary ability to ignore and avoid things (like a missed phone call – my husband will call it back – who cares?!?!?!?).

I suppose there’s more context and history and you’re having to look her in the face and we’re not, perhaps that’s why it’s so hard for us to understand the mentality of acquiesing to her crackpot demands. So I’m not second guessing you….just genuinely fascinated at the dynamics there.

The answer is…both. She’s only caught me at it once over the weekend and badgered me about it the entire time I was home. Would rather not deal with it again. I’m not a fan of being mother-henned, no matter how well-intentioned.

If you stand up to her and tell her what you actually think, instead of caving to her, it would probably do a lot more to dissuade her from further “mother-hen” behavior.

My own parents came up with this kind of nonsense all the time. As soon as you bowed to one crazy idea, there was always another one right around the corner. Once I told them they were nuts and I wasn’t having any of it, it stopped very quickly.

Missed mentioning the part where my parents were disbelieving and arguing with me about the acidity/alkalinity of the fruit (and said I should consult with my engineering cousins…). Jumping straight to pH paper would be pretty condescending. (Well, it’s not great either way, but I was exasperated by repeat discussions.)

But yeah, lots of people have odd beliefs. I’m sure I’ll have beliefs that seem absolutely nuts to my second cousins in a few decades.

I agree. I know that the OP may not have the option of going elsewhere if she disagrees with the landlady, but this woman does not have the right to dictate what you do for your own health. I would definitely keep looking for another place.

Ugh. I’ve had that awful landlord vs room-renter relationship–different issues, but I can still feel the awful power dynamics from here. I hope you get out of there stat, and find a landlord who has zero interest in paying attention to anything you do.

(My older, house-owning friends don’t understand why I prefer apartment buildings to apartments in houses. They don’t grok how incredibly refreshing it is to be utterly anonymous and have no relationship with the people who live around me, and have NO ONE paying attention to what I do or where I go.)

1. The landlady just berates the OP until the OP caves (or pretends to).

2. The landlady threatens eviction. “My house, my (crazy) rules.”

3. The landlady takes and throws away the supplements. Note that this would be stealing, and therefore illegal. If she tried to physically take them from the OPs hands, I think that would also arguably be assault.

I feel like the craziest part of this whole thing is your landlady’s thoughts on women taking protein supplements. As a beginning lifter, I would start a revolt if someone told me I couldn’t take protein powder (it’s just whey!). Please tell me you hide a tub in your room and take it secretly.